True/False – GK Questions

The Basel Convention controls the transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal to protect human health and the environment.

Project Elephant was launched in February 1992 as a centrally sponsored scheme to assist states with wild elephant populations.

The NGT was established on 18 October 2010 under the National Green Tribunal Act, 2010 for effective disposal of environmental cases.

The Air Act was enacted in 1981 to provide for the prevention, control, and abatement of air pollution.

Methane traps heat much more effectively than CO2, giving it a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of about 28-34 times that of CO2 over 100 years.

Albedo refers to the fraction of solar energy (shortwave radiation) reflected from the Earth back into space, not absorbed.

The ozone hole is most severe over the Antarctic region due to the unique formation of polar stratospheric clouds and the polar vortex.

CO binds to hemoglobin about 200-250 times more strongly than oxygen, forming carboxyhemoglobin and causing tissue hypoxia.

Eutrophication causes algal blooms; when the algae die and decompose, it heavily depletes the dissolved oxygen, causing hypoxia.

Higher BOD indicates higher levels of organic pollution in water, as more oxygen is consumed by aerobic bacteria.

The Dodo was a flightless bird endemic to Mauritius that went extinct in the late 17th century due to human activities.

Ex-situ conservation involves protecting species outside their natural habitats, such as in zoos or seed banks.

Alpha diversity is the diversity within a particular area or ecosystem. Gamma diversity refers to the total diversity across a landscape.

Primary succession occurs on bare rock. Secondary succession happens in areas where a community has been cleared but soil remains.

A food chain always begins with a producer (autotroph), such as a green plant, not a consumer.

The biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships with the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere.

UPI's revolutionary design completely abstracts the underlying banking details from the user. Instead of sharing vulnerable account numbers and IFSC codes, users simply transact using a unique Virtual Payment Address (VPA, like name@bank) or by scanning a standardized QR code. This layer of abstraction, combined with two-factor authentication (MPIN), drastically reduces the risk of fraud while making digital payments as simple as sending a text message.

When the price of a good falls, the Substitution Effect always encourages the consumer to buy more of it. However, the price drop also increases the consumer's real purchasing power (Income Effect). For a normal good, both effects work together to increase demand. For a Giffen good (a severe inferior good like potatoes during a famine), the negative Income Effect is so overwhelmingly large that it completely swamps the Substitution Effect, causing demand to perversely fall when the price drops.

Keynes revolutionized monetary theory by arguing that interest is not a reward for saving (as classical economists believed), but rather a reward for parting with liquidity. People demand cash for transaction, precautionary, and speculative motives. The equilibrium interest rate is established where the public's desire to hold liquid cash perfectly matches the fixed money supply injected by the central bank.

Augustin Cournot's foundational model of oligopoly assumes that each firm decides how much to produce based on the assumption that its competitors will not change their current production levels. The market price is then determined by the total aggregate output of all firms. This strategic interdependence leads to a Nash Equilibrium where total output and price fall somewhere between the extremes of perfect competition and pure monopoly.